Chapter 14 #4
I tried to stalk to the door but the furniture contrived to stop me, as I had to weave in and out of an assortment of side tables. It’s hard to stalk with poise and dignity when you have to perform a kind of hula movement around worm-eaten antiques.
Neither Isobel nor Ross moved to prevent my leaving, but once I’d reached the open air Ross came panting after me.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his jacket swinging with urgency.
‘I didn’t mean it to come out like that.
It wasn’t pity – the whole saviour complex doesn’t work like that – I really do need Isobel out and I was desperate enough to want to throw money at the problem.
I’m just starting to realise that everything is a little bit more complicated than I thought. ’
I’d got caught on a bramble and was trying to unweave it delicately from my clothing without causing myself any dreadful injuries, but it suited me to pretend that I had stopped to listen to him. ‘You tried to buy me,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘That’s like… like prostitution.’
‘No, it really isn’t.’ He sounded desperate now. ‘I didn’t know your situation when I offered you the money, and I’ve been trying to talk myself out of wading to the rescue ever since I found out that you’re struggling alone with your daughter. I thought I was doing pretty well, actually.’
I looked at him standing there in his professional outdoors jacket with his hair on end and his fingernails creaking under the strain of being bitten, and I felt a momentary wave of something soft, something like an inner laugh. ‘Oh, Ross,’ I said. ‘You are an idiot.’
‘I know,’ he replied glumly. ‘All that therapy and I’m having to fight not to – well, I don’t quite know what I want to do.’
‘I don’t need saving,’ I said gently, letting the bramble stem twang loose. ‘I know my situation looks dreadful, but it could be a lot worse. I’m happy, Tilly is happy, we’ve got a roof and a bed and food.’
‘I know,’ he said again. ‘But now I know you were escaping from a controlling relationship, and me leaping in to try to control you in a different way won’t have helped.’
I stood, suddenly surprised. ‘I didn’t think of it like that.’
‘Yes, well, you haven’t had the therapy at ￡150 per hour, have you? I’m several thousand pounds ahead of you on the emotional self-knowledge scale.’
‘Clearly.’ I’d sounded more acerbic than I’d meant to, and jumped in quickly in the hopes that Ross wouldn’t notice. ‘So, has Isobel agreed to go, do you think? Will she move into the little house?’
‘She’s thinking about it.’ He glanced up and met my eye. ‘She can’t have had an easy life either.’
‘Maybe she’s chosen to live the way she does. Some people do, apparently; they decide that houses and a conventional life aren’t for them and they—’
‘I mean, with the mutism,’ he interrupted me. ‘Situational mutism can be a manifestation of social anxiety, and that’s come from somewhere.’
I immediately felt guilty. I was seeing Isobel as an obstacle, something that had to be dealt with in order for me to earn my money, not as a human being with an actual past and present.
‘Oh. Yes, of course.’ I thought for a moment.
‘She told me her father had been a mining engineer in South Africa.’
‘Anything else?’
I thought again. ‘No. She never seems anxious though. She’s hardly scuttling off to hide from us, is she?’
‘No, but she’s had years to learn a way of coping.
And perhaps she can cope a little when it’s on a one-to-one basis.
We’ve not seen her in a crowd, have we?’ Ross raised his eyes and stared thoughtfully back towards Elm Cottage.
‘Isobel practically has “mysterious past” written all over her. Or written on one of her pieces of paper anyway.’ He smiled and again I was struck by how much a smile lifted his face and smoothed the lines of his own anxiety away.
‘And she could sell those diamonds and live a life of luxury.’ I looked back at the slowly collapsing roofline of Elm Cottage and then down over the gappy brickwork and flimsy windows.
In the open doorway, Isobel was, once again, watching us.
There was a bird on her shoulder, bent as though it were whispering into her ear, and I shivered.
‘Maybe they’re fake. Maybe she sold the real ones years ago and she doesn’t want to admit it. Or perhaps she wants to hold on to her last memories of her father.’ Ross followed my line of sight and we both watched Isobel, watching us.
‘Or she doesn’t know how to sell them and doesn’t want to get ripped off. After all, someone could tell her that they’re only worth a few hundred pounds – would she know any different?’
‘Would you want to argue with Isobel?’
I looked again at that figure, padded by clothing and wearing the sleek feathers of the crow as though it were an animated ornament. ‘No,’ I said, with feeling. ‘I absolutely wouldn’t.’
‘Well then.’ Now Ross turned to help me with my continuing bramble problem. ‘What are you up to now?’
‘I’m trying to get out of this undergrowth,’ I said, although I realised what he was really asking.
I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to answer him.
There was something very companionable about Ross, with his occasional quiet competency and sheer ordinariness amid the tangle of flailing terrors that was my life.
‘I meant right now. Next. Having spoken to Isobel, you were going to…?’
‘Oh.’ I formulated my reply. I didn’t want to sound as though I wanted to spend more time with him, even though I was realising that I actually did. ‘I have to go and look for work again. And then there’s Tilly to collect from nursery.’
He’d pushed his hands into his pockets again and his shoulders were up around his ears. ‘Why not come with me? I’ve got to go and sort out the gang of builders I’ve got lined up – now Isobel is starting to think about going I can let them have my up-to-date plans.’
‘Well, I…’ My phone, deep in my pocket, pinged with the arrival of a text and that little block of tension that lived under my ribs and kept me connected to my daughter at all times, flared into life.
Tilly. An accident. Hospital. Illness. Be there.
‘I’m sorry,’ I apologised to Ross as I dug into the depths of used tissues and lip balm, random plasters and some loose jelly sweets. ‘I just need to check this.’
‘Of course.’ He stood hopefully at my elbow as I retrieved my phone and opened the screen.
A number I didn’t know. A text.
I want to see my daughter.
I flung the phone as far away from me as I could, and burst into tears.